Rewind

Oops! It has been one of those weeks. First, Channel Seven's Today Tonight had the Shock! Horror! exclusive-of-the-week about margarine making you go blind, only to have the whole proposition debunked by the opposition, Nine's A Current Affair, a few nights later. Then, Sam Newman put on his dunce's hat - again! - on The Footy Show, this time with a smart-arse generalisation about autistic people. Parents of autistic children, in particular, would not have been impressed by his stigmatising of their kids.

And to top it all off, it emerged that a daily $10,000 phone-in competition for viewers of Nine's late-afternoon game show The Price Is Right was not quite what it seemed. Spend 55 cents per call to enter the competition, by all means, but it turns out that for the past few weeks Victorian viewers have been ineligible to win because Nine no longer has a government permit to conduct the contest. Nine went into damage control, promising to compensate any viewer who provides a phone bill showing the number of calls or SMS messages that they made to the competition line. Although this was the right thing to do, and Nine did not hesitate to do it when the first complaints came in, it avoids the real issue.

Yes, there is a warning to viewers on the screen when the daily competition is announced, but it is one of those unfathomable, small-print announcements that most viewers do not bother reading. And I don't blame them. Host Larry Emdur or the show's voice-over man should announce the technicality applying to Victorian (and South Australian) viewers.

I hope the ABC does a better job of warning viewers about something it is putting to air next week. It is a controversial British documentary called My Foetus, screening in the Compass timeslot at 10.15pm on August 8. It includes, for the first time on Australian television, four to five minutes of unexpurgated footage of an abortion.

Julia Black's film for the most part is a re-examination of the whole abortion debate, albeit from a very personal point of view. At the time of filming, she was pregnant. But years earlier she'd had an abortion and wondered whether, in the different circumstances in which she now found herself, she was still as pro-choice as she once was.

In the course of her journey through the abortion debate, Black covers much familiar territory, including the grotesque images that anti-abortion campaigners around the world use of aborted foetuses, sometimes 20 weeks old or more, that have definite human form. They continue to have shock value. And as the father of a son who was born at only 28 weeks (three months premature), I admit to wondering often about the morality of permitting abortions at 24 weeks, as they do, for instance, in Britain.

I cannot forget that when our son was born, almost 18 years ago, a pediatrician caring for him in intensive care told me that only a decade earlier, a baby born at 28 weeks had little chance of survival, whereas in 1986 he had an 85 per cent chance. Our son survived. But almost two decades later, when I assume medical technology allows babies even more premature than my son to be considered viable, can we really continue to allow abortions as late as 24 or even 20 weeks? When does a foetus reach the stage where, outside its mother, it can be helped to live?

Much of what we see and hear in My Foetus is not new, but it is presented fairly and objectively. Black has said, for example, that she is pro-choice but was impressed by the sincerity and conviction of the anti-abortion people she interviewed. But showing an abortion is new. It is horrifically confronting. In this case, it is the abortion of a four-week-old foetus. It has not developed recognisable human characteristics, it looks like little more than splotches of congealed blood sucked out by a surgical vacuum cleaner, but it's not a pretty sight. Far from it.

While our politicians have been making noises about whether the ABC should even screen My Foetus, the gruesome footage is really only a means to an end. Watching medical procedures on shows like RPA is just as likely to upset some viewers.

What is disturbing is what the footage forces us to consider. And I think that is Black's point. In showing us an abortion, she forces us to confront the big question. It may only look like splotches of darkened, congealed blood, but it is the makings of a life.

Black says she made the film to help her decide whether she could accept that abortion destroys a life and, at the same time, still be pro-choice.

She has her answer. She remains pro-choice. And I think I have mine. But what about you? That's why the ABC must resist any pressure to stop this film going to air. It asks a big question and lets us decide for ourselves. It will cause unease for many. It might even distress some viewers. But this is all about real life and real death, and where we should draw the line, and surely there's nothing more important than that.